Progress being made on Clippard School humidity

A Cape Girardeau school district official said Thursday progress is being made in finding what went wrong with a computerized temperature control system at Clippard Elementary.

Assistant superintendent for support services Neil Glass said Clippard Elementary School principal Sydney Herbst indicated in early August that the building "wasn't functioning quite right."

Mark Strickland, a district consultant and principal with Strickland Engineering in Jackson, said Clippard's HVAC system is controlled by a computerized temperature control system, which Glass said was financed by the district's $40 million 2010 bond issue.

Repairs to that system aren't costing the district, Strickland said.

Johnson Controls, contractor on the project, also is working on the problem, Glass said. Strickland said the district has a contract with that company.

"What we found was an electrical issue that erased some of the programming," Strickland said.

That electrical issue was some type of power outage, possibly from a storm.

"We're not exactly sure when this event occurred. It happened over the summer," Strickland said. The "gateway" between the controls, which allowed the building to control individual classroom heating and air units, was "eliminated," he said.

With no one in the building during the summer, no one noticed anything was off, Strickland said. During school, Clippard has 400 students in prekindergarten through fourth grade and 57 employees.

"When we started digging into the controls, we found where the missing link was at. Now we're working to restore that," Strickland said. Some fine-tuning is being done, and in some areas "we're headed in the right direction."

The building control system also left the dampers, or vents, for each rooftop classroom heating and air unit, open 24 hours a day, Strickland said.

Glass said some fabric in the building had mildew on it, and teachers wanted to have the air tested. He also received one email from a parent concerned about the building's air quality.

Mark Bonney at True Test Environmental in Jackson took air samples in the school and it was found to be safe. "It was never unsafe," Strickland said.

With Clippard being a brick building, Strickland said it is "a big thermal mass, so over the summer, we've been pumping it full of humidity, so it's going to take a while to dry it back out."

Ten ServiceMaster commercial dehumidifiers were placed in key areas around the school Sept. 12. Cost for renting those is $12 a day per unit. Glass said they would cost about $3,000 each to buy.

"We didn't install them in any of the classrooms, because although they're not noisy, they could be disruptive," Glass said.

Before dehumidifiers were installed, humidity levels were at 65 percent to 70 percent, Glass said. Now the humidity is below 50 percent.

"The weather changed at exactly the same time as the humidifiers were put in," Glass said. "We're really at the mark we want it to be at. We just have to maintain it."

rcampbell@semissourian.com

388-3639

Pertinent address: 2880 Hopper Road